With rapid development of an Ethernet technology, high-speed Ethernet has been widely used, and a port rate of Ethernet is continuously increasing. However, formulation of an Ethernet industry standard often lags behind the development of the technology, so that when some Ethernet with high rates is have been widely used, auto-negotiation standards of the high rates have not been formulated, so that two ends of communication are difficult to be interconnected.
In a case that the auto-negotiation standards of the high rates have not been formulated, a out-band channel configuration manner or a fixed configuration manner is generally adopted to configure a rate in the prior art.
The out-band channel configuration manner means that when communication of a service channel is still abnormal, the service channel is configured through a maintenance channel. The maintenance channel requires hardware support.
The fixed configuration manner means that during initialization, rates at two ends of communication are fixedly configured to a certain high rate supported by the both two ends of the communication. When a rate capability of a certain end changes, manual reconfiguration is required, otherwise the two ends of the communication cannot be interconnected.
During implementation of the present invention, the inventor finds that the prior art has at least the following problems:
Rate configuration relies on specific hardware, or manual configuration is required to complete rate auto-negotiation, and rates cannot be switched flexibly.